Here is the plain and awful truth. Since I stopped working in October our savings has dwindled and dwindled until this past week when it was completely gone. DH doesn’t get paid until next Tuesday and we have about $160 to our name right now.   So you can imagine my despair when I received a reminder e-mail that one of our credit card payments is due this Saturday and the minimum payment is $250.

Luckily DD was sleeping so that I could fret and despair by myself for a couple of hours while I stared at our bank account balance and tried to figure out how we are going to make this work. I finally came to the conclusion that we either need to get all of our credit cards paid off PRONTO or I need to go back to work. Dh and I both don’t want that because we feel it is best for little E to have a consistent caregiver and that person is ME.

So we came up with an eight month plan where we spend absolutely no money except for what is necessary to live on and we put all our money towards our credit cards. If we can do this we will have them paid off in November of this year. That’s not so bad right?

In order to find out how long it will take to pay off our cards I found this website that calculates it all for you.
Then I printed out our budget and crossed out everything that could be spared and reduced the rest to the bare minimum. This is what it ended up looking like.

-Of course we have all our mandatory bills like our mortgage, second mortgage, hoa, auto insurance, and utilities.
-No more gym
-No more chiropractor/massages
-No hair cuts, for me anyway (I know…YIKES)
-Deferring our student loans
-Grocery’s $300
-Gas $175
-Entertainment/Dining out $80
-Clothing $30
-Household $30

This basically means that I cannot buy ANYTHING that I don’t need. It also means that we can’t take any big summer vacations or go to an expensive restaurant. But if it is only for eight months I can live with it. If there is something that we really really want to do, like see Wicked for our anniversary, or take Eva to Disney on Ice like I was really wanting to do then we might have to cut back on some other areas as well. Like getting rid of cable or cutting back on our cell phone use.

I’m hoping and praying that by the end of this experience I am a better person and I will be able to live with less for the rest of my life. At least I know I will have less stress in my life.

I’m already so proud that we walked to the grocery store last night and only spent $25 for the whole week!

Oh and I was very relieved when I called the credit card company and they told me they would give us a one time reprieve on our payment this month. Meaning we don’t have to pay them anything until next month and we will not be punished at all! That was a relief.

Tomorrow I will share my list of things I figured out we can do for free or practically free this summer so we aren’t completely stuck in the house.

*photo credit: flickr

tags: Budget, credit cards, Debt Diet, Money